Music: The Next Generation

Rossen Guergov, 20, is struggling with the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Baton in hand, he gestures stiffly to a piano quintet assembled inside a rustic rehearsal room at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's outdoor venue in western Massachusetts. "Tadada-DAAH!... Tadada-DAAH!" The musicians sound oddly hesitant and out of sync. "Why is this not working?" asks Seiji Ozawa, music director of the BSO, who is paying an impromptu visit to the workshop. "It should come from a man's power, from here," he says, pointing to his gut. He then steps, shoeless, to the front of the room and conducts the passage himself. Leaning close to the musicians, arms stretched forward and brows furrowed, he takes a short, loud breath to signal the upbeat and... it's as if five new musicians have entered the room. They play the famous passage with newfound strength and drama. "With me, the musicians sounded a little surprised," says Guergov, a conducting fellow. "But when [Ozawa] came in, it was just natural, and with power."

Ozawa makes conducting look easy. But in truth his tux tails are harder than ever to fill--not because there is a shortage of aspiring conductors but because they're facing increasingly complex challenges. For starters, the popularity of classical music is on the decline. As entertainment options continue to multiply, orchestras are searching for new ways to stay relevant and raise revenue. Meanwhile, the classical repertoire continues to grow exponentially, overwhelming the typical student. "We're in a transition period," says National Symphony Orchestra director Leonard Slatkin, 57. "But I think we'll find our way out of it."

For now, it remains a tough field to break into. Over the last two years, five vacancies among top orchestras have gone mostly to established conductors. Ozawa, 66, will move to the Vienna State Opera next year; Lorin Maazel, 71, is taking over the New York Philharmonic; Simon Rattle, 46, will replace Claudio Abbado at the Berlin Philharmonic; Christoph Eschenbach, 61, is taking up the baton in Philadelphia, and the Austrian Franz Welser-Most, 41, will replace Christoph von Dohnanyi as head of the Cleveland Orchestra. Boston has not yet filled its post, but is in negotiations with Metropolitan Opera director James Levine, 58. Considering that Leonard Bernstein, Ozawa and Levine were in their 30s when they ascended the podiums of the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony and the Met, respectively, the new round of appointments has underscored what some say is a crisis in conducting: a shortage of young people with the stature of the previous generation. Others say there's plenty of young talent--it's the unwillingness of major orchestras to engage it that's to blame.

Why does it even matter? Few today understand what a conductor does. A famous New Yorker cartoon shows a maestro following a score filled with diagrams of arm movements instead of notes. The conductor's task looks deceptively simple: cuing seasoned musicians who, let's face it, have played the piece dozens of times.

Nonetheless, the profession is filled with complexities that aren't immediately apparent. "A music director's job," says Tom Morris, executive director of the Cleveland Orchestra, "is not just to conduct but to train. To develop with the orchestra a style, some consistency of approach to making music." Apart from the technical aspects of the job (keeping the orchestra together, maintaining tempo, balancing the volume of different sections), great conductors have an almost mystical ability to inspire players. This requires not only a profound passion for the work, but also an ability to communicate complex emotions and ideas through gestures and expressions. "The main attraction for me to conducting is that it's impossible," says Robert Spano, 40, director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and of Tanglewood's conducting program.

There is no set career path for a conductor. All start out as instrumentalists and gradually build their expertise. Eventually, they will need to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of each instrument in a symphony orchestra. Some go on to attend graduate school in conducting; New York's Juilliard and the Royal Academy of Music in London are among the most prestigious. Other musicians, like pianist Eschenbach and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, build careers as soloists before making a segue to the podium. Many, like Leonard Bernstein, are also composers.